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We’re just starting day two of the 2013 Bay Area maker faire! We had a lot of fun yesterday meeting lots of people as they came by. Plenty of people are asking us how we are different from other sensing and Internet of Things groups — and given how many groups there are I totally understand the confusion!

The Owl Platform philosophy has two important ideas. First, people should be able to just unpack a sensor from a box, stick it somewhere, and forget about it. This means that sensors should be ready to use straight from the box and shouldn’t require constant maintenance, which is why the multi-year lifetime of our sensors is so important!

Our second main idea is that people want to program sensor data, not the sensor! Programming a sensor is a real pain — you need to worry about interrupts, wireless networking, battery consumption, and a lot of other details that don’t matter to your goal. Owl Platform’s network API let’s you get right to working with your sensor data so you can get right to making the sensor application you want. Our API is so simple that many of our apps can be written in 50 line Ruby scripts!

Check out the open source implementation of our API in C++, Java, and Ruby at github.com/OwlPlatform and read more about our system at www.owlplatform.com/developers.php

We’ve just finished our last-minute scramble to get ready for Maker Faire 2012 in NYC. We’ve been planning this for several weeks, and we should have a good demo ready for tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll see a few friendly faces (family and coworkers), and many new faces who are interested in what we can provide.